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The Making of Draco

Kevin Rafferty is a computer graphics supervisor at ILM whose team worked extensively on Draco. We asked him to explain how ILM goes about bringing a mythical being to life.

CG Supervisor Kevin Rafferty Discusses the Making of Draco

"About the same amount of data as four t-rexes from Jurassic Park,
made up the data for Draco's wing."

Kevin Rafferty

Draco and Bowen (Dennis Quaid) from Dragonheart

Long before Jurassic Park, Marin-based Industrial Light & Magic had
been doing great special effects for the movies. In this summer's crop of
movies, ILM's been responsible for the hurricane in Twister, scenes in Mission
Impossible that it contractually can't talk about, and a good deal of other
cool stuff. From a technical standpoint, perhaps the most impressive recent
accomplishment was the creation of Draco, the last of the dragons, the object
of Dennis Quaid's knightly quest in Dragonheart. Draco is a virtual character
who interacts with the real ones, and incidentally has the voice and mannerisms
of Sean Connery. He is a being many generations removed from a cheesy plastic
Godzilla smashing scale-model Tokyo. Kevin Rafferty is a computer graphics
supervisor at ILM whose team worked extensively on Draco. We asked him to
explain how ILM goes about bringing a mythical being to life.

Mary: What was your mission, and what were the technical
challenges that came with it?

Kevin: Our mission was the greatest challenge, in that we
wanted to create a character that was not only believable but had subtle
nuances of the human actor who was providing the voice.

Mary: How well-defined was the character on paper before
you started?

Kevin: We started out with a sculpture, a scale model with
moving armature so we could spread the wing out and move the arms and legs
and open the mouth. It was a pretty detailed study of what they wanted to
see, and it went through quite a few iterations of how they wanted Draco
to look in pre-production. At first he had a longer snout than he ended up
having...

Mary: In the movie he almost looks like a Persian cat!

Kevin: Right, because we wanted to go away from the normal
idea of what a dragon was, and most of the time you do see this longer, wolfish
kind of snout on a dragon. We thought shortening the nose would help distinguish
the different character and help us get him to emote better.

Then as we developed the lip-sync software, the in-house software that
we developed for the film, we started making minor adjustments so we could
get that little Sean Connery crook of the eyebrow and what have you.

The main design of the character did come early.

Mary: You just had to make it real.

Kevin: Yeah!

Mary: So how did you go about that?

Kevin: It's a very long process.

We wanted to add as much geometric information as possible on Draco, to
have actual real nooks and crannies around his forehead, and veins and things
like that. Normally this would be done with texture mapping, which is projecting
a picture on the geometry to gain certain feelings of rising and falling
on the skin.

We wanted to add in the actual geometry, to give it one step more towards
realism.

Once we have the 3D model that's animated, we light it. It's almost like
we're virtual set lighters in that we bring Draco into the scene, and put
key lights and fill lights on him, and make sure the leathery skin texture
maps are working correctly, to make it fit in with the live action. We go
away at night and let the computers render frame by frame all of the animation.
It scans out each frame based on the work we've done that day, tweaking all
the lights... We have the horsepower of the SGIs-we had 12-and 16-processor
Challenges as our big render engines, and we also used everybody's workstation
at night. We run takes of all of our shots that are in progress every night,
and we have dailies every morning. So each night we would have to our avail
about 150 CPUS.

And it was never enough!

The size of the data of Draco was amazing-about the same amount of data
as four T-Rexes from Jurassic Park made up the data for maybe Draco's wing.

Mary: So you start out with analog video, or film, or what?

Kevin: We start out with film. We get a background plate
of film, scan that in frame by frame, 24 frames a second. Then basically
we take the models we've built-we have a team of character animators who
would choreograph Draco's movements. They would start out by choreographing
his gross body movements, making his actual body language fit with the live
action actors, using SoftImage on SGIs.

The character animators would give that choreography information, along
with the model data, to technical directors, the digital lighting artists,
to merge the choreography with the material characteristics that Draco should
have to fit seamlessly into the background plate. Each night we send off
that render, scan out the lighting information and choreography of Draco,
and then composite it into the background.

The character animators will also use our proprietary software we call
Caricature to put in all the subtle expressions-not only make the lips move
to the words spoken by Sean Connery, but also nudge in all the subtle nuances
of facial expression.

All the character animators had character sheets of Sean Connery, pictures
from all the movies he's made and all the different emotions he's had. They
had a sheet full of his faces in anger, and surprise, and delight, and love.
That type of thing. So they always would have visual reference. It was up
to the talent of the artist more than any type of scanning and morphing to
get those nuances that brought Draco and Draco's face to life. it was an
incredibly talented team of people working with really good hardware from
SGI and software from other companies as well as inhouse. We used Alias for
model-building, SoftImage for animation. Then

We used Renderman for lighting and our own in-house software to embellish
SoftImage's animation with our lip-sync software, Caricature. It's actually
emotion, lip-sync, shape-building-it's a big megillah! (laughs). And then
we have our own in-house compositing software.

For production of movies like Dragonheart, we use pretty much exclusively
SGI hardware.

Mary: You compared the amount of data in Draco's wing to
the T-Rexes in Jurassic Park. How has the technology evolved since that time?

Kevin: Actually, things have changed in both the hardware
and software arenas. SGI, since Jurassic Park, has provided companies like
ILM with faster machines....

Mary: But it's never enough!

Kevin: That was going to be my next point. The workstations
as well as the rendering engines, the big servers, are faster and faster,
but that just gives us the opportunity to put more and more complexity and
realism into the motion. No matter how powerful the machine is, we'll find
a way to bring it to its knees! [laughter]

Mary: Meanwhile, down in Mountain View, they're taking this
as a challenge!

Kevin: Well, yeah! Exactly!

Also, software-wise, with our proprietary stuff, we find it a challenge
to say,
"Okay, this is too much data for the machines to handle all at once;
let's split it up into different tiles." At some point when we had really,
really complex scenes, we would have four processors working on one frame,
rather than one frame to one processor, which is the normal way we do things.

Mary: I remember from some presentations I've seen on the
Jurassic Park dinosaurs that a huge amount of work goes into things like
anatomically accurate movement and correct physics and things like that-how
the leg moves when the dinosaur hits the ground with all its weight, and
things like that. When you're dealing with an animal that never existed,
what issues like that apply?

Kevin: That's a very interesting question, and very poignant
to Draco, in that the physics applied were the physics the director, Rob
Cohen, wanted, because it was a mythical creature.

It depended on the emotion of the shot, the feeling of the shot. At times
he wanted Draco to be a magical mythical character who was made not of flesh
and bone but of light. And so in that respect, and in those shots, we took
the idea of taking suspension of disbelief one step further, seeing this
massive creature flit about like he had no weight.

At other times, when it called for him to have a strong presence, and be
in, like, a fight scene, we kind of said, "Okay, we wanted him to be
made of light, and as such normal gravity and physics do not apply, but in
these shots he needs to have strength, and he needs to have mass, and he
needs to have gravity."
And so in those respects we had to put those things in.

Once again we used our Caricature software to manipulate shapes for, say,
the biceps and where the legs meet, the chest area, so when he'd slam his
claw down there'd be a little bit of vibration and movement. That took us
into another realm of research, which Draco didn't directly benefit from,
but he was the catalyst for future research into skin-over-bone techniques-kind
of automating that type of jiggle with gravity, and making it work in a character
animation world, where the animators still want control. They don't want
it really automated, because sometimes when you put in the true physics and
stuff it just doesn't perform like you want it to-it's too mechanical. So
the character animators still would like the final say, to be able to go
in there and tweak things. Those are the type of tools were trying to develop
for them.

It's funny that we had to approach both sides of the coin with Draco, and
it also spurred on this whole research team working on a series of software
items for doing just that.

Mary: So when the characters in the movie are interacting
with Draco, are they actually interacting with a bluescreen?

Kevin: There was actually very little bluescreen going on.
Most of the time they were out in Slovakia on location, in the middle of
a field or what have you, and they would be talking to ping-pong balls. (laughs)

We would have a series of ping-pong balls out in the live-action shot where
Draco was going to be, to be able to triangulate and match the live-action
camera to the computer camera. We used those things to triangulate data,
and then we didn't have to take them out of the plate because we were going
to put Draco right on top of it. It served a double purpose in that Dennis
Quaid and all the actors who were interacting with Draco could focus on something.

Mary: They didn't have to imagine everything.

Kevin: Exactly. Exactly. And then for times when there were
close-ups and stuff, they had a cutout of a profile and a front view of Draco's
head. "This is where he's going to be-set your eye-gaze here." Then
it would be up to us to make Draco fit into that scene.

If there were objects in the foreground, our rotoscoping team would go
in...

Mary: What's rotoscoping?

Kevin: It's actually the digital form of an old technique.
It's been around in the optical world for a long time. Say there's a log
between the camera and Draco. Since this wasn't done bluescreen or anything,
and Draco needs to be behind that log, the rotoscope team will go in and
digitally outline that log, frame by frame, and create a matte, so at composite
time we can bring in the live action plate, put Draco over the live action
plate, and put the log back over Draco.

Mary: And do they also deal with issues like since the sun
is in east in the scene, the log has to be lit correctly?

Kevin: No, there was no lighting involved, since it was a
live-action log, it was part of the plate. We had to take that into account
when we lit Draco-we would have all that information on our camera sheets,
we knew what time of day it was, and we had these reference pictures, a man
standing in front of a camera with the same camera setup as the scene, with
a huge white styrofoam ball that showed us visually where the sun was and
how the bounced light was acting. We always had visual references as well
as real numbers, because usually neither works well, you have to merge the
two together to make something really believable.

Mary: What do you think could have been done better if you'd
had infinitely perfect tools?

Kevin: Infinitely perfect tools!

Our saying always is, 'It's never done, you're just out of time.' (laughs)

What I wish we'd had more time doing was there was supposed to be a magical
quality to Draco's wings, and we were developing a really beautiful iridescence
for his wings. It never worked correctly twice.

Mary: It was beautiful a million times., but never-the same
twice?

Kevin: Exactly.

Mary: Now you just have to turn that into a feature.

Kevin: Exactly! Some might contend, "Well, he's a magical
creature, so what?" But when you were cutting from shot to shot, and
it was supposed to be there in both shots, it just didn't quite look right.
So I wish we'd had more time developing that to make it really, really good.
There are other things. We achieved the way the eyes work quite well, but
I wish we'd had more time developing how the eyes dilate and possibly get
the little musculature in the iris to work more like a real eye would. Those
are little things that you'd probably see the fifth or sixth time you saw
the show. Those are the things that I myself personally would have loved
to have more time working on. I was thinking of the wet look, when Draco
was in the lake or the rain and stuff-I think we achieved that quite nicely.

Mary: So what exactly do you do at ILM?

Kevin: On the credits I'm called a Digital Effects Supervisor.
At ILM my title is Computer Graphics Supervisor.

What I do is I supervise a team of the technical directors, the people
who do all the lighting and bring everything together, bring the mattes from
the rotoscope people, bring the choreography and the lip-sync from the animators,
and bring the live-action plate in and make them all merge together seamlessly,
and put any effects on top that need to happen, like if he's breathing fire
or any of those things. That's basically what a technical director does,
and I supervise part of the technical direction team, along with two other
supervisors.

Mary: What did you do before Draco?

Kevin: I was a CG supervisor on Casper I supervised a lot
of the technical directors and helped develop how the ghosts looked on a
shot-to-shot basis.

Casper was a magical being too-did he present different challenges from
Draco? He was a magical being. However, we could take a lot more liberties
with Casper, because he was a ghost, and he was a familiar character. It
was a double-edged sword-we had liberties because he was a ghost and amorphous
and this cute little blob that ,as flying around in space. But also we had
to be true to this cartoon character-he had to be recognized and loved as
Casper.

The challenges were different there-how to make something from a comic
book come to life in 3D, and be believable and recognizable. And then we
had all the amorphous qualities that ghosts have-going through walls, going
invisible and still disturbing the air a little bit it was a completely different
set of challenges. The one similar challenge was the lip-sync. The lip-sync
stuff from Casper was totally different than what Draco had. It was one of
those things like Draco and the skin-over-bone-just like Draco was the caralyst
for our skin-over-bone research, Casper was the catalyst for the lip-sync
program that we used on Dragonheart. It's kind of a nice evolutionary thing-the
realized needs of one film will come to full realization, probably, in the
next film.

Mary: So what are you working on now?

Kevin: I'm working on pre-production on Jurassic Park II
The Lost World.

Mary: Aha! Did you work the first One?

Kevin: No, I came to ILM just as they were finishing the
last shots of Jurassic Park I

Mary: Well, there's plenty of legacy stuff from that! [laughter]
And on the other hand, the world has moved on quite a bit, Draco's wing suggests-what
will you be able to do technically that you couldn't before, without giving
away any big secrets?

Kevin: I can say this-our biggest challenge is to be better
than the first one!

Section last modified:
June 16, 2012 06:52:28

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